December 8, 2008

Millennium : Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order by Jacques Attali

I finished reading the book Millennium : Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order by Jacques Attali.

About the author:

Jacques Attali was born in Algiers in 1943. A novelist, essayist, and writer, he has been special adviser to President Francois Mitterrand since 1981. A former professor of economics at the École Polytechnique in Paris, Attali is currently president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London. [1]

This book was translated from French, the copyright is 1991 and it is a first paperback edition.

When I was first reading this book I didn’t really like it cause it sounded really dumb compared to the other books I read. Attali would talk about “elites” but he wouldn’t name any names. You got books by Carroll Quigley who names names so you know who Quigley is talking about.

Attali:

An elite typically controls the market—the prices and the products; the elite accumulates the profits, controls the salaries and the workers, finances artists and explorers. The elite defines the ideology that supports its power. [2]

Quigley:

The names of some of these banking families are familiar to all of us and should be more so. They include Baring, Lazard, Erlanger, Warburg, Schröder, Seligman, the Speyers, Mirabaud, Mallet, Fould, and above all Rothschild and Morgan. . . . they were almost equally devoted to secrecy and the secret use of financial influence in political life. These bankers came to be called “international bankers” and, more particularly, were known as “merchant bankers” in England, “private bankers” in France, and “investment bankers” in the United States. [3]

Attali’s book is from 1991. Attali talks about memory cards and Sony Walkmans. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Between Two Ages book talks about weather modification where you can create floods and droughts and that book is from the 70s.

Attali:

These objects—whose embryonic forms, like the Sony Walkman or the laptop computer, are ubiquitous today—will help create a different human being. [4]

Brzezinski:

. . . techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm, thereby weakening a nation’s capacity and forcing it to accept the demands of the competitor” (Gordon J. F. MacDonald, “Space,” in Toward the Years 2018, p. 34). [5]

And then in Attali’s book he talks about man-made global warming, which I’m sure he knows was made up by the guys at the Club of Rome, but he still put it in his book.

Attali:

Germany intends to stabilize emissions by the year 2005, and Sweden is ready to introduce a tax on carbon dioxide. The European Community is committed to preventing the increase of its carbon dioxide emissions. [6]

Alexander King & Bertrand Schneider:

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. . . . The real enemy, then, is humanity itself. [7]

But then when I looked at the back cover of Attali’s book I paid more attention to the review quotes on it.

“Sometimes big topics are best handled in small books. . . . Jacques Attali, the controversial Frenchman who runs the newly created European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, has done just that.”

— Tim Carrington, The Wall Street Journal

“Attali is a one-man think tank, a prolific generator of thoughts and theories.”

— Christopher Redman, Time

“A brilliant man, Attali produces more ideas in a week than most people do in a year.”

— The Economist

“Provocative and brilliantly written.”

— William P. Bundy, The Asian Wall Street Journal [8]

The other guys like Brzezinski don’t need that crap on their books. Brzezinski just has at the start of his Grand Chessboard book:

For my students—to help them shape tomorrow’s world [9]

So Attali’s book was made for people who are impressed by review quotes from Times, The Economist, etc.. Then at the start you got this guy, who I’ve never heard of, Alvin Toffler writing the “Forward” saying:

The fact that my friend Jacques Attali is unknown to most Americans, including most American thinkers and policy-makers, is a measure of America’s intellectual provincialism. [10]

I looked up what “provincialism” meant and it means:

The condition of being provincial; lack of sophistication or perspective. [11]

So this makes the person who picks up Attali’s book think that they’re sophisticated for knowing who Jacques Attali is, cause “most American thinkers and policy-makers” don’t know who Jacques Attali is, but now the person does.

Some cool stuff:

. . . the coming new order will be based on its ability to manage violence. Unlike previous orders, however, which first ruled by religion, and then by military force, the new order will manage violence largely by economic power. [12]

Something that got me thinking was on two of the pages in the book:

The memory card will become the principal artificial limb of a person, at once an identity card, a checkbook, a telephone, and a fax machine—in sum, nomadic man’s passport. It will be a kind of artificial self.
To use it will only require plugging it into the global electronic networks of information and commerce, the oases of the new nomads. These networks will be as easily accessible, homogeneous, and integrated as today’s automated tellers whose services we use by simply inserting our bank cards into their slots. Such networks of the future will be located in banks, stores, all public places (at least in the most wealthy metropolitan areas). One day, commands will be given by simply speaking.
Middle-level nomads will stay in places that are impersonal, like the hotels that today ring airports throughout the world. Only the most fortunate rich nomads will have the means to become property owners in the large cities, which will be the magnetic poles for their brethren from all areas and regions of the globe. Cities will be fortified, dangerous places, the tangled heart of electronic networks, a cabled field of dreams. [13]

One day, everyone will wear a wrist instrument that will continuously record the beat of the heart, arterial pressure, and cholesterol level. [14]

So if the wrist instrument can record the beat of the heart and all that other stuff then it can record how many breaths you are taking. Cause if you can convince everyone that CO2 is causing global warming then you can tax everyone for CO2, cause you exhale CO2. And the wrist instrument is a good way of keeping track of every breath you take.

Attali gives a Spanish example by this guy Paul Kennedy:

Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers . . . Kennedy notes, the Spanish monarchy was sagging under massive debts and inefficient industries, dependent upon foreign manufacturers, and beholden to special interests at home. Despite the glittering display of its armed might, by the 1640s “the suspension of interest payments and declarations of bankruptcy by the Spanish kings fully revealed the decline of Spanish power.” [15]

On the next page Attali says:

Overextended debt has always been a sign of economic maladjustment, a telltale symptom of fatal imbalance before eventual demise. [16]

A lot of people think there will be a utopia. There will be, but not for the ordinary people.

This new order will not put an end to history. It will not be a utopia, harmonious and placid. . . . Ordinary people will gape with awe and resentment from their modest suburbs and homeless streets at the high rises of wealth and skyscrapers of power that will loom above their reach. [17]

I think he’s talking about the European Union here:

But they will nevertheless be forced to do it. One day, all of Europe will be united, one way or another, replete with continental institutions. [18]

Wouldn’t Attali be a parasite? Cause if he’s an adviser to a President of a country then that means he gets paid by tax money. And tax money comes from ordinary people working jobs who pay their taxes.

And then you got guys like Brzezinski using quotes from Karl Marx calling people “bourgeois cattle”.

Writing almost a century ago, [Karl] Marx observed that . . .”. . . The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spread inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century.” When to the press and telegraph is added the contemporary global role of radio and television, and to religion are added contemporary ideologies, Marx’s observations become even more pertinent. [20]

One last thing:

In the coming world order, there will be winners and there will be losers. The losers will outnumber the winners by an unimaginable factor. They will yearn for the chance to live decently, and they are likely to be denied that chance. They will encounter rampant prejudice and fear. They will find themselves penned in, asphyxiated by pollution, neglected through indifference. The horrors of the twentieth century will fade by comparison. [21]

Before in the book Attali was saying:

Nevertheless, even if the world seems daily to be growing closer, more homogeneous in its cultural values and material aspirations, even if large corporations are establishing themselves in all countries, power remains in the hands of an elite. An elite, moreover, that resides in those few places where power and wealth accumulate, where the critical questions facing the planet are decided. [22]

So you would think that critical questions decided by the elite would involve making the “. . . horrors of the twentieth century . . . fade by comparison.”

That would be a big change from now. I was wondering how you could do that change, cause everyone is screaming for change. You could do like Carroll Quigley talks about in Tragedy & Hope and use war to get that big change. Quigley says that the change that would happen in 50 years of peace could happen in 5 years of war. So 100 years of war would be like change that would happen in 1000 years of peace. 100 years of war would probably be enough to bring about that kind of big change.

Any war performs two rather contradictory services for the social context in which it occurs. On the one hand, it changes the minds of men, especially the defeated, about the factual power relationship between the combatants. And, on the other hand, it alters the factual situation itself, so that changes which in peacetime might have occurred over decades are brought about in a few years. [23]